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I feel like this is untenable, and would simply lead to no one at all being arrested. If officers are forbidden from physically stop me from fleeing, why wouldn't I just flee? Under your rules, they cannot put themselves in a situation where they could be in danger regardless of what decisions I made.
I am not suggesting that officers can't stop you from fleeing. The problem is that we already have standards of what they are permitted to do to stop you from fleeing, and those standards don't let them shoot you.
Either let them shoot you for fleeing, or don't. Don't say "they can't shoot you for fleeing" and then let them game fleeing into looking like a threat so they can shoot you for that.
The issue is that (as someone who does not want to be arrested) I can game-theory them into letting me flee under your rules. That means they literally can't do their job, as anyone who does not want to be arrested can force the issue by engineering a situation in which the officers can must choose between:
You have stated that #2 is not permissible - so it collapses back into #1, of every criminal must be allowed to flee.
The issue is that the police can escalate from one level of force (the level permitted on a fleeing person) to a greater level of force (lethal force, permitted on a threat) by creating a situation where the first looks like the second. The first level of force is not zero, so this doesn't require that the police avoid all physical confrontation. It does mean that sometimes people will flee, but if that's a real problem, then change the standard so that more force is allowed at the first level--don't blur the first and second levels together.
Okay, so I think I understand where our disagreement is coming from (thank you for the clarification on your position); I have been operating under the belief that the officers were attempting to arrest Good, and the action of being in front of the vehicle was as part of the arrest. If I understand your position correctly, you believe that the officer being in front of the vehicle was somewhere in the range of "being extremely negligent" to "deliberately there in order to justify shooting Good if she attempted to flee." As such, (I believe that) you believe that the officer should not be permitted to use the vehicle accelerating into him in his defense, as it was due to his own actions that it happened. Is that correct? (If it's not, please correct me; I'm trying to phrase this in a maximally "I am trying to understand" way, not in a "I am putting words in your mouth way", but I understand that may not come across via text).
I think the standards for the officer using the vehicle accelerating into him as a defense to shooting him should be stricter than normal. There is a need for officers to be permitted to make split second decisions, but there's also a need to not let that get out of hand, and officers are known to game confrontations a lot like "honestly I smelled marijuana" or "you looked like you were speeding" or making it unclear whether you are free to go.
It's possible that in this particular case the threat was clear enough that even under stricter standards he had reason to shoot (despite the initial reporting).
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